Parting Ways by Judith Butler

Author:Judith Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL040000, Religion/Judaism/General, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

HANNAH ARENDT AND THE END OF THE NATION-STATE?

Hannah Arendt has never been easy to categorize and that probably has to do in part with her rather insistent critique of settled categories within her political writings of the 1930s and 1940s. There are a series of divisions that she sought to evade and reconceptualize in her early political thinking. They include, for instance, the ostensible differences between Zionism and assimilationism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, the nation-state and the rights of man, and even the polar positions of left and right within the political spectrum. She was engaged in a very particular kind of critical practice, one that sought to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. For instance: if the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely the nation-state is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. And: if the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative? Arendt refers variously to modes of “belonging” and to conceptions of the “polity” that are not reducible to the idea of the nation-state. She even refers, in her early writings, to the idea of a “nation” that might be delinked from both statehood and territory. As such we might ask: does she settle on an answer to the question of whether there is an end to the nation-state? Or does she only unsettle a number of assumptions about political life as she tries to approach and evade this problem?

Let us consider two quotations that bring us into a critical encounter with a certain kind of equivocation that marks her political thinking in this domain. She was once asked, are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? And she replied this way: “I don’t know. I really don’t know and I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had such a position. You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.”20

The second quotation makes clearer what is at stake in her refusal of a certain kind of positioning of political place and, indeed, with the spectrum of right and left that it is up against. It emerges in the course of a correspondence in 1963 with Gershom Scholem that I cited in chapter 1. It is fairly well-known, but in my view not extremely well understood. The background is that Arendt had taken at least two public positions that irked Scholem. One of them had to do with her critique of the founding of the State of Israel in the late forties and early fifties. But the other was the publication and defense of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. Her phrase “the banality of evil” enraged many members

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